Sister Winter
by Empatheia
Summary: Grimmjow x Halibel. Until he wins, he will stay and fight. Victory is hers from the beginning, but that does not stop him from trying anyway.


**A/N:** Written for **firstmidnight** for the January round of flashfics at LiveJournal. Any excessive poeticism can and will be blamed on the fact that I listened to Vanessa Carlton's _Winter_ obsessively on repeat while writing it. Lyrics at the beginning are from there and made me think of Halibel speaking of Aizen.

Enjoy!

**xxxxx**

_**Sister Winter**_

**xxxxx**

_He sits behind a desk of mahogany_

_He whispers dreams into my ear_

_And though I've given him his empire_

_He delivers me my fear_

_I carry all the weight of empty promise_

_As I stand swallowed by the light_

_I carry on _

_I carry on_

_We carry on_

It both startled him and didn't surprise him at all.

This had always been her favourite trick, hiding the whole of herself within the dim light so that she could not be seen by anyone or anything. Even his senses could not detect her when she chose to hide, and she had been choosing to hide tonight. He wondered sometimes how she managed to disappear without feeling invisible. Certainly he would never be able to vanish like that without his ego dying at being so unseen.

"How long have you been there?" he asked, irritated, wiping the screen clear though he knew it was far too late to hide from her.

She stepped out of the light into the shadow where she was visible again, her strange eyes unreadable between searing brows and raised white collar. "This is the seventh time in a row you have come here. What is it about her that so fascinates you?"

He snarled, wanting to rend her into pleasingly powerless pieces and knowing he would die for trying. "She's doesn't 'fascinate,' me," he growled. "I'm trying to figure out why she fascinates _Aizen-sama._ She's pathetic, weak, breakable. All she has going for her is that weirdass power--"

"And you cannot see why for that alone she is of interest?" Halibel cut him off, crossing her arms under her indecently half-bared breasts that somehow managed to be both lewd and untouchable. "Surely you are not so foolish as all that, Grimmjow Jaeger-Jacques." She walked silently past him to the terminal and drew her fingers across it absently, calling up the image that had been on it moments before. Inoue Orihime stood, as she often did, before the window and stared up at the un-moon as though it offered some kind of comfort.

"Don't insult me, bitch. I get that her power is special and useful, yadda yadda, whatever."

"Clearly you do not," she reprimanded without a trace of emotion in her voice. "What she offers Aizen-sama, should he learn to utilize her unique talents to their fullest stretches, is nothing short of immortality. If you cannot understand why this intrigues him, you are not worthy to serve under him."

"Immortality?" Grimmjow echoed derisively. "Yeah, right. If he were to die, which I can't see happening anytime in the near future, who's to say she wouldn't refuse to revive him at the cost of her own life? She's a stubborn little bitch, she'd seriously do it."

Halibel shrugged dismissively. "At her current level of ability, she could certainly refuse. Note that I said 'fullest stretches' in reference to her potential. She has not yet tapped into even a tenth of what she is capable of. I suspect Aizen-sama believes that once fully released, she will be able to grant some sort of eternal protection upon his life that will render him invincible. And, I add, Aizen-sama is not foolish enough to use her own life as leverage. He will most certainly use her regrettable care for others in her life against her."

"So you think he'll threaten to kill her friends if she doesn't do it," Grimmjow translated. "I don't know. It might work-- I mean, it's Aizen-sama, even I have to admit he's capable of shit nobody's seen before-- but the longer she stays here, the better she's getting at seeing the big picture, if you know what I mean. She might figure out that he'll kill them anyway once she does what he wants and refuse anyway."

"That is up to Aizen-sama to solve," Halibel replied with a small shrug. "I only attempted to explain to you why she interests him, and I have now done so. If you intend to continue watching her, I shall leave you to it." True to her word, she turned and swept soundlessly out of the room.

"I'll be there at the usual time," he yelled after her. "Don't be late."

She didn't answer him, or give any indication at all that she'd heard him, but he knew without doubt that she had. She would be there, waiting once again to tear him to shreds and make him stronger.

Grimmjow watched her go with deep misgivings. She might not be physically stronger than him, but he knew better than to cross her. Her anger, when someone managed to stir her to it, was unsettling even for him. She didn't waste time talking to her victims, explaining why and how she was going to kill them (a weakness of many arrancar, Grimmjow reluctantly included). She simply killed them, without preamble or hesitation, and did not look back or gloat over the corpse. Nor did she care for the concept of fair fighting. If she could kill a target while their back was turned, she would do so. For that reason, Grimmjow was more careful around her than he was around any of the other Espada. There would be no big showdown with her if he gave her a reason to wish him dead-- he would simply turn away from her one day, unsuspecting, and die.

Of all the Espada, she was coldest and wasted the least emotion on fighting. That was why, out of all the Espada, she was the most dangerous, and the only one he was even slightly afraid of. It thrilled him that she frightened him. It made him want to beat her, made him strive yet harder for strength so that one day he could stand over her broken body and smile victoriously. It made him want to fuck her until she screamed and condescended to say his name, to _beg_ him, defeated by her own lust. Her strength made him _want_ her, her death and her desire, everything she had to surrender to him.

He wasn't stupid enough to try and take anything, not yet. But someday. Someday he would be strong enough to win, and then he would take _everything_.

For a few more minutes, he watched the woman who would make his oldest, greatest rival immortal watch the moon and wish for death. Then he stabbed the screen to blackness and stalked out of the room to where Halibel waited outside, staring at the same moon as though it spoke to her.

He could feel his blood tearing through his veins in anticipation of pain and destruction. These were never pleasant sessions, but he was no stranger to pain and would suffer anything for growth.

_Dance with me_, he felt like saying, but that was maudlin and far too poetic for his tastes, so instead he drew his sword and flew at her, meeting her halfway in a shattering of sparks.

She never bothered to speak to him. The sparring had been a concession on her part to begin with, conversation would have been too much to ask. He yelled his usual threats and epithets out of habit, knowing that they had no effect on her but feeling better and more himself to utter them. They were no more meaningful than the shrieks of metal as their blades met or the hissing shuffle of sand beneath their feet. This was them, everything between them, short and young and belligerent-- a clash of swords beneath a deathless moon, swallowed by a pale and cruel desert. They were children still, only newly awakened to their own power.

Halibel was older than most because she remembered more than most, but she didn't forget how short a time had passed since her eyes had opened anew.

Grimmjow didn't forget either, though he would never admit it.

They were silly children with the power of death at their fingertips, the only power granted their miserable half-existences. Grimmjow only wanted to make sure that he had more of this singular power than anyone else, because some distant voice out of his past told him that without it he would be nothing but a restless snapping ghost condemned to walk without purpose until a second death came for him. The best, or nothing. He saw nothing in between.

Today, he was still nothing, for Halibel was winning, silent and relentless as always. He was bleeding, red on the white sands, tired and pointlessly defiant because there was nothing else to be right now.

"Do you yield?" she asked, a strange look in her eyes that he would have recognized on anyone else but was too out of place on her to be named.

He shook his head, exhausted and torn apart but still too proud to admit defeat. "Suck my--"

She was in front of him, suddenly, too fast for his weary eyes to catch. Her fist sank into his midriff with a sharp thud, folding him in half around her fingers. "Yield," she ordered, "or I will kill you."

Grimmjow knew she meant it. She never spoke anything less than absolute truth, having no need of lies to protect her ego. If he didn't yield she would ruin him beyond repair, but fuck if he would lose to her, a woman without anything to fight for.

"Fuck you," he gasped with the last flurry of breath in his lungs, and reached up with shaking bloodstained hands to yank her face down to his level and kiss her, tongue carrying on the attack his hands had faltered with.

She permitted it, fighting him this way as she fought him every other way, her eyes open and meeting his in a fierce, mortal glare. Her fist uncurled against his belly, wandering away to caress the borders of the hole in his soul, the narrowest point of his waist, the sharp edges of his hip. Even this way she was impossible to catch off guard-- for her reaction, she might have been expecting this.

He wanted to throw her to the sand and tear his way into her, take that at least if he couldn't win anything else.

Halibel forstalled him, pushing him backwards and falling atop him with perfect grace, her mouth commanding him gently, wordlessly, to give up. Victory was hers, had been hers from the beginning. Her hands were travelling him, plane to plane, exploring wonderlessly as though she expected everything she found.

"Get off me," he raged, but he couldn't move, didn't _want_ to move.

She accepted his protests, letting them slide down her throat like water as she kissed him, owned him, pressing him mercilessly into the desert until it half-swallowed him. "Yield," she murmured. Her breasts were hot and pressing against his chest, her knee was between his thighs, her body was undulating against his like the ocean he'd only ever seen once, and he couldn't do anything except--

"Not a chance," he growled defiantly, knowing it was useless and dangerous but not caring.

She did not smile, gave no sign of triumph. "Very well," she said. His clothes were as nothing beneath her fingertips, tearing and falling away like cobwebs. "I shall make you yield."

He was naked, she was naked, but neither of them were vulnerable. This was still a battle, not a loss.

It was she who impaled herself on him, but somehow it was him who felt stabbed, invaded. She swallowed him, devoured him, ate him whole, without a single flicker of weakness on her frighteningly beautiful face. He fucked her from beneath, determined not to lose without fighting, fingers hard on her strong hips and face fixed in a half-permanent snarl.

"Weak," she whispered, almost to herself.

He roared a wordless sound of fury and forced his body past its endurance in order to flip her over, land atop her, and drive into her as if to split her in half.

She smiled up at him, serene and unaffected, which only made him rager harder into her until he climaxed with a furious yell of triumph. A moment later she closed her eyes and arched slightly upwards against, the only indication of her pleasure she would allow herself to show him.

It still felt like a loss. He pulled away and assembled his clothing, smirking at her in the futile hope that she would be angered.

Halibel stood as though she had only bent to pick something from the sand, unconcerned with her own blinding nakedness. "I will wait here tomorrow," she said, the same thing she said every time, "do not be late."

Oh, but he hated the untouched smoothness to her voice. He had made her feel, and she acted as though she'd hardly noticed. "Oh, I won't be," he whispered, half a snarl. "I'll be here until I win, you whore."

"Then you will be here forever," she said mildly. Then, more quietly, as she turned away, "I would not complain."

A small victory, that. Grimmjow did not miss it. "Aww, would you miss me if I left?"

Halibel chose not to reply, instead drifting away over the ivory dunes back towards the palace of death they both called home. He knew it for the _yes_ it was and wished he could feel more triumphant about it than he did.

Why was it so impossible to win a victory over her? Grimmjow didn't know, but he vowed to stay and fight her until he figured it out.

Until he won, he would stay and hate her, love her, want her. Until he won, he would stay and share the silent desert with her, the white walls, the blood and pain and inevitable growth of power.

Until he won, she would wait for him.

Until he won, he would come to meet her.

Until he won they would be together.

Victory would come, eventually... but oh, not _yet_.

**XxxxxX**

**A/N:** I don't even know. I give up. XD


End file.
